Tag Archives: GOP Sex Scandal

You don’t have to know much about South Carolina to know that, except for certain areas, the Republican Party owns the state, including the no-paper-trail ES&S voting machines that made Greene the winner. As Garland Favorito notes in “New Evidence That Alvin Greene’s ‘Win’ in SC Was Stolen!”:

“As you may already know Alvin Greene, an unemployed former military veteran who paid a $10,000 qualifying fee, did not even run a campaign. Greene held no fundraisers, ran no paid advertisements, made no campaign speeches, hired no campaign manager, conducted no state wide tours, attended no Democratic Party county events, printed no yard signs and did not even establish a web site. Vic Rawl, a county commissioner, former judge and four-term state representative, ran a normal, aggressive campaign as his campaign manager, Walter Ludwig, has explained. He personally campaigned in at least half of the counties made radio and TV appearances, attended the state convention, collected official endorsements, had 600 volunteers, printed 10,000 bumper stickers, established 180,000 database contacts, created a 104,000 Email distribution list, had 3,300 Facebook Friends, sent out 300,000 Emails just prior to the election, received 20,000 web site hits on Election Day alone and was more active on Twitter than the other Democratic Party candidates.

“So how did this happen? All South Carolina elections are conducted on statewide unverifiable electronic voting equipment manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). South Carolinas voting machines have no independent audit trail of each vote cast. This is necessary to audit the accuracy of the vote recording mechanism that transfers the selections the voter sees on the screen to the vote storage areas. All precinct printouts, ballot images and any other forms of paper documents that can be printed are not created independently but produced internally from the machines after the vote was recorded and could have been corrupted. It is technically impossible for anyone in the state to claim that South Carolinas Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines record accurately on Election Day since there is no mechanism such as a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) to independently audit the vote recording. No amount of pre-election testing can assure DRE recording accuracy. The Federal Election Assistance Commissions (EAC) Technical Guidelines Development Committee concluded that: The National Institute of Standards and Testing & EAC Security & Transparency Subcommittee do not know how to write testable requirements to satisfy that the software in a DRE is correct The reason for such a conclusion is that many electronic voting machines, such as those used in South Carolina, can be programmed in a variety of ways to count differently on Election Day than during testing. As a result, South Carolina voters cannot verify that the selections they see on the screen were electronically recorded, election officials cannot audit the actual vote counts and there is no directly created evidence of voter intent that can be used in a recount.”

So, while Vic Rawl won handily in certified mail-in absentee paper ballots by a 55 to 45 percent margin, the easily hacked and unverfiable ES&S equipment gave the hapless GOP plant Greene a 60 percent landslide. The probability of this happening is on the order of winning the Power Ball lottery 10 times in a row. As Favorito writes elsewhere in the article:

“Alvin Greene was declared the winner based on a near landslide 60-40% margin in Election Day electronic voting results. However, certified mail-in paper ballot results, received from the counties after a 15-business-day response period allowed under South Carolina law, show that Vic Rawl actually won the verifiable mail-in paper ballot absentee voting by a solid 55-45% margin.”

There’s Justice for the Mark Sanford’s and Then There’s Justice for the Rest of Us

“The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.”— Lady Marguerite Blessington

The Tattlesnake isn’t quite as forgiving as was Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown June 26. Alter said he felt sorry for Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) and concluded he was a ‘nice guy.’ Sanford’s having an extramarital affair is really none of our business, and even his lying about it, to an extent, is understandable, but there are some other dimensions to the lurid Sanford saga that display a ‘public servant’ who is considerably less than what most would consider a ‘nice guy,’ aside from his towering hypocrisy.

First there was his attempt to deny $700 million in federal financial aid to South Carolina’s schoolchildren and unemployed, merely to score political points with the GOP base with an eye to a 2012 presidential nomination. That doesn’t sound very ‘nice’ to me.

Then there’s the fact that, after all of the soap-opera revelations regarding his affair with a married Argentinean woman, and outrageous lies concerning his whereabouts as he disappeared for seven days, followed by tearful public apologies, he still refuses to resign.

Moreover, he has confessed to violating South Carolina state law prohibiting misuse of public funds and adultery yet Sanford has not been arrested for either.